This is the second in a series by Berkeley faculty focusing on
the troubled state of American families and calling for new policies
directed toward helping children.
The authors were brought together from across campus through an
interdisciplinary seminar, the Berkeley Forum on the Family. They
are among 11 faculty who have collaborated on a book, All Our
Families: New Policies for a New Century. These essays, written
for Berkeleyan, are aimed at bringing the forum debates to a larger
campus audience.

Adolescent parenthood has been with us for centuries, but only
in the past 25 years has this phrase entered the lexicon of social
problems.

By conventional wisdom, adolescents are thought to be too self-centered,
heedless and moody to be good parents. They do not even have the
legal rights and responsibilities of adults. Becoming parents,
it is said, will disrupt their own paths toward adulthood and
their childrens future opportunities.

The assumption is that if a young woman waits to have a child,
she will be better equipped for parenting. She is more likely
to be married and to be physically and emotionally mature, with
more money, more education and more support from family, friends
and the childs father.

But if early childbearing is so stupid, and delay so obviously
smart, what do we make of the one-fifth of all women who give
birth before they turn 20? Even if they dont deliberately intend
to have children (and some do), most of these young women neither
try very hard to avoid pregnancy nor choose abortion to end it.
What do they see about their lives that policymakers do not see?

Could it be they see a world of very limited resources and even
less opportunity? They see they have almost no chance of finding
work while they are still teen-agers. Few of their friends are
going to college, and their own poor school records and lack of
funds seem to rule out college for them, too. They are surrounded
by young men with the same limited prospects.

In the harsh environments that are the inner cities and poor rural
towns of this country, young children may seem to provide one
of the few bright sources of hope, of relationship and joy to
teen-agers who think they will lose little and might gain much
if they have a child  and they could be right.

Ethnographic data and at least one large-scale study support the
argument that, given the lack of educational and employment opportunities
available to disadvantaged adolescents in the United States today,
and the lack of child care and other assistance for low-income
parents of young children, some young women  not all, but some
 are better off having their children as teen-agers rather than
in their early 20s.

Most surprisingly, the taxpayer may be better off too. In a national
study from 1996, welfare expenditures for women who had babies
before age 18 were less than for equally poor women who had babies
in their early 20s. The same study showed that teen-age mothers
had worked and earned more by the time they were in their mid-30s
than had comparable women who delayed childbearing until age 20
or 21. The differences were small, but they clearly ran counter
to expectations.

Why? The answer seems to be that having children while very young
permits these women to enter the labor market when they are in
their mid-20s. Later childbearing delays their start into paid
employment.

Teen-age mothers may also have a greater claim on familial resources
such as child care than older mothers do. They often have a greater
claim on social resources, in the form of specialized education
programs for teen-age parents, health care and (sometimes) counseling.
No comparable special programs exist to help poor mothers in their
20s.

Some social scientists now talk of teen-age childbearing as an
alternative life course, meaning alternative to the recommended
life-course of education, then marriage and childbearing. It is
a shocking indictment of Americas racial and economic inequalities
that one can plausibly see early childbearing as an adaptive strategy
for some young women, a strategy that might actually be better
for them than delaying parenthood.

Middle-class, middle-age adults like to believe that young people
have a world of opportunities before them. But most of the girls
who become teen-age mothers are not living in that world. They
cannot realistically expect to become economically secure members
of the middle class. They have been left behind by Americas powerful
economic engine.

Contributing Authors to All Our Families: New Policies For a
New Century (Oxford University Press, 1998).